The Messy Middle vs. Actually Hard: How to Tell the Difference

This episode is for you if you've been telling yourself "business is just hard"... and wondering if that's actually true, or if maybe you're making it harder than it has to be (doh).

There's a real difference between the natural messiness that comes with growth (and yes, success is messy; no that's not the problem!) and the kind of hard that happens when you're taking 30 steps when 3 would do. Today we're talking about how to tell which one you're in.

I'm sharing four common ways business owners turn the messy middle into an uphill battle:

• The role your expectations are secretly playing
• The gap between your plan and your actions (and what's actually creating it)
• What connection — or the lack of it — is doing to your momentum
• The confidence disconnect that makes selling feel way harder than it needs to

The question I keep coming back to - one I learned from a colleague at Encyclopedia Britannica, of all places - is: what's the problem you're actually trying to solve? Because when you can answer? Everything else gets a lot simpler.

You don't need to berate yourself to success. You don't need to be shoving yourself uphill. But you do need someone willing to ask you the hard question - because trust me, we are ALL very good at ducking it.

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Transcript

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Welcome to this episode of Uncomplicating Business. I am Sara Torpey. I am a business coach and forever teacher, and all the things. If you're here a lot, you already know all that. Today, what I'd like to talk about is one of the phrases I'm hearing a lot lately.

 It seems like one of the things I'm hearing a lot from people lately is this idea of a messy middle in business, and I think there is a difference between the messy middle and when things are harder than they have to be, and what I'd like to talk about today is how you make that distinction, because is it just messy because you know sometimes things are messy, success is messy, growth is messy, or is it feeling messy and hard because you're making three steps when there's one or 30 steps when there's three, right?

 Does the messy middle and feeling the mess indicate that it's time to simplify something, and if it does, how do you know? So, today on the podcast, we're going to talk through, I think, four of my favorite ways to think about this, and the question I always ask, so way back prior to entrepreneurship, I worked for Encyclopedia Britannica, and I used to work, I worked with salespeople, I worked with developers, I did everything, I did all kinds of things, and in that role I used to work with a tech guy all the time, and I would walk into his office with some sort of problem, and I'd be like, "Okay, I need a green button, and he'd go, "No, and his question back to me would always be, "What's the problem you're trying to solve, and he, without knowing it, trained me to ask that question all the time, so he's, he's lovely that way, but when we're so, the question I want to lead with today is the same one he asked me all the time, when things are feeling harder than they should be, and you're trying to figure out if it's harder than it should be, or it's just messy. The question I'd ask is, what's the problem, right? What's feeling hard, and why is a question I ask clients all the time.

 As a business coach, it is, you know, when people are like, it all just feels hard, like, okay, what feels hard and what feels hard about it is not the question any of us want to answer in the moment, but it is the place to start, because if it's like, well, I just can't get anywhere, I'm not getting any traction, I am not accomplishing things, I am not meeting the right people. It's not, you know, whatever it happens to be. Sometimes when people are like, I don't know, it's just not working, and we sort of dig into the data and the information, we find that it's just, you know, it needs time and patience, and it feels messy, but that's the reality. But other times there are, I think, problems that come up, and so today there are four, I think, that come up over and over and over again with my clients. The first one is a should, and it is one I think about in my head, in the label on the bucket, as it were, is the role of expectations. 

So, any, anytime somebody says, you know, it's messy, it feels harder than it should be. I don't understand. It's like, okay, wait, what is that? What is the role of expectation here? What were you expecting it to feel like, because I think sometimes what happens, I know sometimes what happens to me, I see it happen with clients, is that we clear some sort of hurdle, and then we want it to all be good, we want to be done with the hurdle, and what we forget is there is always another hurdle, and life is like that, but business is also like that, so if you are thinking like it should be easier, it should be faster, it should be better, it should be different, is the first question to ask after like what's feeling hard and why, what's the role of your own expectations in this right, is are there expectations that you have that are getting in between you and seeing progress? Are you taking time to look at your successes? Are you writing them down? Are you capturing them, because if you're not prior. 

Probably your brain is only spending time thinking about what's not working, and that becomes an expectation problem, because your brain doesn't have any evidence that anything is working. For me, expectations and managing success and being aware of success are all part of being grounded as a business owner, they're part of being connected to yourself and your value in your business and firmly rooted right in, like, okay, it's messy and also it's working, versus it's messy and I think it's broken, which is a crappy place to be. 

The second thing that people bring up time and time again is I know the I know the list of things I have to do and I'm just not doing them, and so for me the question there is what is creating the distance between your plan and your action, it might be internal dialog, it might be time, it might be the structure of your time, it might be the structure of your calendar, it might be processes you've put in place to help you, but you've outgrown. It might be that the things you're planning and the actions you want to take don't actually support your plan, and somewhere in your brain you know that it might be that the actions you're planning to take are ones that are really not you, right. When people come to me and they're like, well, but I'm not repurposing all my content, right? Like, well, okay, what if you didn't have to do that? And they're like, oh, then I'd make more content, like, well, okay, then go do that, right? You don't have to do it all the same way, or in the way you think you should. 

So, if there are actions you're not taking, even though you planned, it's like, what, what's the distance between the plan and the action? The further apart the plan and the action are, the harder the action becomes to take, and I mean that both in like internal mental distance, pardon me, and external time distance, you can make a plan, and if you're not going to take the action until two weeks later, you know it's like making plans with a friend to go out to dinner a month from now, and you get there and you're like, ah, do I really want to do this most of the time, you do, but you know part of your brain is like, but I'd really like to be in my sweatpants tonight.

 So, when we give ourselves too much space, actually the whole like, is it right, is it perfect, is this the right choice, did I plan the right thing, do I even want to do this, all of that gets in the way of momentum, so that is how this looks in a planning context, right. There is also a piece of this that is related to connection for me, when business feels harder than it should, and it's different than the messiness, just the natural messiness of success. 

Sometimes it's because business is never harder. Nothing is ever harder than when you are trying to do it alone. When the only voice in your head is yours, that's the hardest version of this possible. And you know, I was talking to a parent friend the other day, and we were talking about our older children, who have both had challenges in the last couple of years in school and other things, and she was talking about how her husband said, you know, like she could just tough it out, and you know, my philosophy on that for my own kids has been something like, sure, they can tough it out, but if they don't have to, do we need to choose this version of hard right for me as a business owner? I know that if I'm alone in my own head, I'm not sharing my ideas with people, I'm not meeting new people, I'm not bouncing what I'm trying to do off of someone that things get all jammed up, and so part of the question for me when things are feeling harder than they should is, Am I connecting? What's the role of connection in my world right now? Because honestly, if there's not connection happening and I'm not being connected to my people or to the people that support me, I am, I am, I'm making it harder than it has to be.

 The last piece I'd say about this is that the other thing people come to me time and time again to say is that selling is hard, and that can be true, selling may never be comfortable, but it can feel far more natural, and much of the time that we are feeling harder than it should be in sales, when it is not about just messiness of being human. In is because there is some sort of confidence disconnect between you and your ability to sell, between you and your thought that people want it or don't, between you and the thing you are trying to sell, between you and, you know your belief that of that there are buyers, right? If selling feels harder than it has to be, think about where the maybes are, where the confidence disconnection be, and that's not going to answer everything, but it's going to answer a lot of the time, because there's confidence disconnects, and when those are resolved, the process pieces that are problematic are like the easiest thing ever to solve. 

They become like, oh, move this piece over here, change this question that you're asking, and things right themselves. But the confidence disconnect is the hardness that you feel right, it is not a process problem, it's a, it's a connection to what you're selling, problem a connection to how you're selling problem, and that feels hard, and part of it's practice, right, all of this part of this is practice, but there's difference between it's just uncomfortable and it's harder than it should be for you today. The key I want you to walk away with is success selling, connecting, planning, being a grounded business owner. They're all messy, but just because it's messy doesn't mean it also should be hard all the time, like you shouldn't have to be shoving yourself uphill, you shouldn't be dragging yourself, you shouldn't be doing things you hate doing, you shouldn't be constantly creating guilt and hard on yourself, you, you don't need to berate yourself to success. If that worked, we'd all be billionaires, trust me. 

But at the same time, if we can ask ourselves, like, what's actually feeling hard here, and why, or better yet, have someone else ask us, because I will tell you, my clients are great at ducking that question. I asked somebody yesterday that question, and she was like, right, but I want to talk about this other thing. Well, no, you don't actually, you want to talk about this, you just don't want to talk about this. So, if you're checking in and things are feeling harder than they should be, please find somebody to talk to about it. Find a business coach, come into the uncomplicating business lab. 

This is what we do. We work on grounding, planning, connecting, and selling every day, every week, all the time. This is the function of the lab. It is the function of coaching. It is the function of having an accountability buddy, or any of those things. So, please welcome those things into your world, because they are part of what makes the messy middle feel possible, and also not harder than it should be. 

So, if you're interested, I'd love to see you in the lab. There are some summer bonuses coming in the lab, so if you haven't taken a look at that page recently. Now is a good time, and they only last through the end of June. All right, friends, I will talk to you soon. I'll see you on the next episode. Bye bye.